Sharona Franklin

Sharona Franklin is a Canadian multidisciplinary disabled artist, writer, designer, consultant, and advocate. Deeply invested in bioethics and disability activism, her work explores radical therapies, bio-ritualism, ecology, and social interdependence. Franklin’s practice probes the psychic, social, and biomedical conditions of living with chronic degenerative diseases influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Many of her works draw on vernacular craft traditions and botany while also referencing pharmacology and cybernetic craft, creating tensions between the domestic and the techno-scientific. Franklin’s gelatin sculptures encase syringes, pills, hardware, and medicinal plants and flowers picked by the artist, while her textile works feature images and axioms surrounding discourses of disability, gender, class, and bio-citizenship. Her use of varied organic and pharmaceutical materials connects her extensive research into bioethics and environmental harm with holistic propositions for remediation and care, subverting the domestic alienation of disabled individuals and challenging our ideas surrounding accessibility, ableism, and care.

Her work was recently presented in solo exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge), King’s Leap (New York), and La Maison de Rendez-Vous – LambdaLambdaLambda (Brussels). Notable group exhibitions include the Audain Art Museum (Whistler), CIVA Museum (Brussels), Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), and New Image Art Gallery (Los Angeles), among others. Franklin was commissioned for a city-wide public art project in Vancouver in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2021. Her recent publications include Injustice in Biopharm (Cassandra Press, 2019) and Rental Bod (Peace Library Publications, 2016).

Bradley Ertaskiran, 2024